Moveable feast

This article is about Christian holy days. For the book by Ernest Hemingway, see A Moveable Feast.

In Christianity, a moveable feast or movable feast is a holy day – a feast day or a fast day – whose date is not fixed to a particular day of the calendar year but moves in response to the date of Easter, the date of which varies according to a complex formula. Easter is itself a "moveable feast".^{[citation needed]}

In addition, in the Anglican Christian tradition, Boxing Day, the first working day after Christmas, is also a moveable feast, it is normally the 26th of December (which is also St Stephen's Day), but if Christmas Day falls on a Saturday then Boxing Day is the following Monday.

By extension, other religions' feasts are occasionally described by the same term. In addition many countries have secular holidays that are moveable, for instance to make holidays more consecutive; the term "moveable feast" is not used in this case however.

By metaphoric extension, a movable feast was used by Ernest Hemingway to mean the memory of a splendid place that continues to go with the moving traveler for the rest of life, after he has had the experience of it and gone away. The author used the term A Moveable Feast for the title of his late-life memoirs of his early life as a struggling writer in Paris in the 1920s. He said to a friend: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."^[1]

Moveable feasts in Christianity

• Triodion – the period of 70 days before Easter (Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Greek-Catholic)
• Septuagesima – 63 days (ninth Sunday) before Easter (Pre–Vatican II Calendar)
• Saturday of Souls – 57 days before Easter (Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Greek-Catholic)
• Sexagesima – 56 days (eighth Sunday) before Easter (Pre–Vatican II Calendar)
• Quinquagesima Sunday – 49 days (seventh Sunday) before Easter (Pre–Vatican II Calendar)
• Shrove Monday – 48 days before Easter. (Western Christianity)
• Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras – 47 days before Easter. (Western Christianity; not technically a moveable feast, because it is not a holiday on any church calendar)
• Ash Wednesday – 46 days before Easter. (Western Christianity; strictly speaking, not a feast but a fast, characterised by solemnity and acts of self-denial)
• Triumph of Orthodoxy – 42 days before Easter (Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Greek-Catholic)
• People's Sunday – 41 days before Easter (in Malta)
• Mothering Sunday – 21 days before Easter (Anglicanism)
• Passion Sunday – 14 days before Easter (Anglicanism)
• Lazarus Saturday – 8 days before Easter (Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Greek-Catholic)
• Palm Sunday – 7 days before Easter
• Maundy Thursday – 3 days before Easter
• Good Friday – 2 days before Easter (Good Friday is actually a fast rather than a feast. See Ash Wednesday above.)
• Holy Saturday - 1 day before Easter
• Easter – the date around which the others are placed
• Saint Gregory's Day – 3 days after Easter (in Malta)
• The Octave of Easter or Divine Mercy Sunday, also known as Low Sunday or Quasimodo Sunday – the Sunday after Easter.
• Radonitsa – 8 or 9 days after Easter (Eastern Orthodox)
• Ascension Day – 39 days after Easter
• Pentecost – 49 days after Easter (50th day of Easter)
• Whit Monday or Pentecost Monday – the day after Pentecost
• Trinity Sunday – 56 days after Easter (Western Christianity)
• All Saints – 56 days after Easter (Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Greek-Catholic), but in the West this feast is fixed on November 1
• Corpus Christi – 60 days after Easter (Western Christianity)
• feast days of some significant saints' days, if a moveable feast falls too close to their usual date.

Some of the fixed feasts in Christianity

• Christmas – December 25
• Octave of the Nativity – January 1
• Presentation of Christ in the Temple – February 2
• Transfiguration – August 6
• Dormition of the Theotokos/Assumption of Mary – August 15
• Exaltation of the Cross – September 14
• feast days of most individual saints

References

1. ^ Hotchner, A.E., Papa Hemingway, New York: De Capo Press, 2005, p.?

External links

• "Why Some Feasts Are Moveable", a Slate article
• Advent, Christmastide, Lent, Eastertide